


Lambent Heart

by kiiouex



Series: dead leaves in the water [1]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Altered Memories, Body Horror, Death, M/M, Manipulation, Second person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 08:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4013146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wirt has been carrying the lantern for about as long as he can remember. Sometimes he tries to recall his past, sometimes he tries to claw away the vines he can feel growing up his arms. At least the beast is always there to soothe him. </p><p>Terrible manipulative memory-erasing Wirt/Beast, T for sadness and body horror</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lambent Heart

**Author's Note:**

> I watched all of OTGW last night so today I wrote this :V hope you enjoy, please let me know what you think!

He has his hooks in you pretty deep. You know because you can feel it, feel the tendrils in the back of your throat, the tug on the tight bonds on your wrists if you ever dally too long. Of course, you checked, but you probed the back of your throat and found nothing but nausea, studied your arms in the light of the lantern and saw nothing, no bonds, no tight wooden grip.

You still feel it, when the light’s gone.

But it’s alright. You understood a while ago, a long time ago, that this was just how things were going to be. And the Beast’s presence is a comfort. Time moves immeasurably, but he is a constant, he is the light hand on your shoulder and the whispers in your ear. He’ll stay with you. You can remember, distantly, all your old fear but you haven’t felt afraid of the beast in a long time. Not since you learned how not to anger him.

The beast is your guide and he steers you through the wood carefully, makes sure you always have enough. He knows where shelters are to keep you from getting cold, he knows where to find water, he teaches you to forage and lay traps and snares and you are never hungry. He takes nothing himself, just waits at the edge of the lantern’s light while you sleep. When you tripped, and cut your leg open in a long gash, he wrapped it up in twigs and vines and when they lifted the wound was gone.

Sometimes you feel pain under your fingernails, in your ears, but you don’t ask him to ease it. You’re hoping if you don’t think on it, it will go away. And it does, for a while. You just pick at the tips of your fingers and feel the tendril coiling in your throat.

Once, you picked at the ties on your wrist too much, and when you finally felt your nails slipping on blood, you’d left your wrists a raw, bloody mess. “Why did you do that?” The beast had asked you, and you turned the lantern away so he could slide in close to you, pick your hands up carefully in his own, study the wound while you shivered at the touch of his gnarled wooden fingers. “There’s nothing there.”

You know. You _know_ there’s nothing there. You thanked him for his concern, and he kissed the back of your hand, and he suggested you take some extra hours to sleep, get some rest, banish the phantom touches and whispers that play through your mind. You follow his suggestion, but his words echo through your head as you try to drift off, and you try not to panic as you wonder about what he’d said. You’d always thought those whispers were his.

He has to tell you when to sleep often, or you won’t. Walking through the woods gets trancelike, the methodical plod of your steps on the ground, the even lurching of the shadows from left to right as the lantern swings in your hand. He tells you, “You’d lose yourself, without me,” and you laugh and agree and wonder if you aren’t lost already. If you didn’t lose yourself at the bottom of the river long ago.

You aren’t sure what happened, back then. You don’t remember how you came to bear the lantern, but you do, and you can’t imagine any other life giving you more because you don’t need more. Maybe the beast came to you. Maybe you offered. You’re just glad you found your way.

No other humans talk to you, but some of the animals do. Some fuss and worry, saddened for such a nice boy losing his way, but most are dumb and content and offer pointless, idle conversation that you enjoy whiling away the time with. It reminds you of someone you used to know, but a lot of things do, and those nagging feelings of familiarity never resolve into anything real. It’s easiest not to think about those things.

You run into the horse again, once, and he remarks at how much happier you seem. How much more relaxed. And you can smile, and laugh, and talk to him, but you consider what he said for a long time. You haven’t forgotten how you used to be. You haven’t forgotten how anxious and sad and self-conscious and scared you used to be. But the woods took all that from you. The beast took that from you. You’re grateful. You’re happy.

You cut down edelwood trees, because that’s the only thing in the world that’s required of you. Fair’s fair, anyway; the beast feeds you. Gathering oil for him is the least you can do. You don’t seek out the trees, you just walk, and the beast just nudges you every now and then, minute course changes that lead you to edelwoods whenever you need them.

You don’t ask about who the trees used to be. It’s maybe the last sore point you still have, and even though you threw up the first time you chopped one, even though you sometimes still hear the groaning of the woods as voices, and the faces following you around same as the ones studding the beast’s body, you can do it. You can chop down the trees, and take them back to the mill he helped you repair, and you can grind them down to the oil you need. You just can’t ask.

Sometimes the beast tells you anyway. “This one was a fool,” he says to you, and you want to ask how he knows since he’s always with you, but you realized a while ago that he has more eyes and ears than you could count. “An explorer. Thought he could chart the unknown.”

You can close your eyes as you swing the axe, but you can’t blot out his voice in your ears.

“This one was mad with grief,” the beast tells you, and he’s curling his long fingers over your shoulders, digging in and making you wince and making your axe hit the trunk wrong, a useless ‘thud’ in the wrong place, another wound for the tree. “Her child died and she thought she could find him in here.”

You run out of ways to tell him that you didn’t want to hear it. The beast’s eyes just glow, and you shiver and fall silent. His hands are on you soon after that, stroking, soothing, coaxing you back into his arms.

It doesn’t stop him from telling you the edelwood’s stories.

It’s not that you see yourself in them, because you don’t. It’s that there’s something very close-to-home about the chills the trees give you, something in your mind that tells you ‘that could have been you. Or… that could have been –‘ and you don’t _know_ the other name, just feel that same dim haze of old pain and fear, and all your memories of it are out of your reach.

Sometimes you wonder if he’s got tendrils in your brain.

Sometimes, when his fingers close around your throat and he hums, danger edged with fondness, you think about becoming an edelwood to feed him yourself and end your wandering. Sometimes you think about asking him what he really thinks of you, wants from you, and sometimes you think about surrendering yourself to him even more completely than you already have.

Sometimes you try not to think.

Even if you don’t see yourself in the trees, you do recognize parts of yourself in travelers. Only the locals can last in the Unknown, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of folk who wandered in by mistake or otherwise. You hear them speak of their homes, or other destinations. Most move with purpose. The ones that don’t are already beginning to take root in the woods. You sense the beast’s shining eyes on them. Making a note of where to return to.

You’ve stopped feeling bad for the ones who speak of leaving the unknown. You’d had sympathy, for a while, back when you hadn’t accepted your fate. Now you see them as foolish, for not having accepted theirs. Boys and girls and older folks who walked among the trees, and the beast keeps you back from the paths, keeps you unknown to them, makes you as much of a specter as he is.

You see Beatrice, once, though you don’t know it’s her until you hear her voice, until someone else calls her name. She’s from a local family, and she doesn’t make the obvious mistakes, she knows how to survive in the woods, she knows to stay in at night, to stay away from the beast, to avoid the one carrying the lantern.

She doesn’t recognize you.

Just a glimpse of you and your lamp in the dark, and her eyes were wide, and she was afraid, and she stormed back to her house with her shoulders set and fists clenched. But she didn’t know it was you. It’s the strangest thing to you, that she’s a new person, in a new body, and you recognized her. How much have you changed? You’re a little older, you know, and you think you might have gotten taller. You don’t look at yourself much, but you assumed you were the same. Maybe that was foolish.

The way the beast touches you has never changed, long tender strokes down your face, an iron grip around your middle, the kind of chuckle you’ve come to guess means fondness. His body is strange, pitted and gnarled, and you never touch him much. He doesn’t seem to care. You used to hate him touching you, used to hate how clear he made it that you served him, that bearing his lantern was a statement of servitude, that you were an extension of his possession and nothing more.

You’ve come to ignore it, mostly. On cold nights you might lean into his hand, a little more, but usually you just close your eyes to block out the cold, white brilliance of his.

Once, you imagined you’d been hit by a car, and his eyes were the headlights, haunting you. But even that long ago, you’d had your suspicions about the river. And you never dream of cars, you dream of dark waters and creeping vines and your lungs full of muddy water and dead leaves.

You hear singing, one day, and it’s enough to make you stray. The song drifting through the trees is familiar, for all that it’s nonsense. You listen to the singing, and step a little closer to the path. You can feel the beast close behind you, but you’re distracted, cocking your head, listening. You can’t figure out how you know the song, the ridiculous tune that you couldn’t have heard more than once before. You aren’t sure how the voice could be familiar either, not so far from any habited areas. You can’t figure it out.

Then you see him, and you don’t have to. “Greg,” you breathe, and you rush forwards, a thousand feelings and memories exploding through your body, a cacophony of emotion that’s almost enough to knock you over.

Something catches you around the neck and you choke out a gasp as you’re yanked back, hard. There are claws in your shoulder a second later, a rough wooden hand tight over your mouth, and the beast is holding you against him, making some shushing sound that is infinitely too little to calm you.

You struggle against him, straining madly, eyes bulging out of your head as they track Greg down the path. You’re too far back in the tree line, too far back in the shadows, and you can’t move, can’t scream, can’t do anything. You sag inside the beast’s hold.

“Good,” he tells you, voice gentle. “Just wait. Be patient. He’ll be an edelwood soon.” 

You scream into his hand, and he chuckles, fond, dragging you along with him as he moves, tracking Greg from the shadows of the trees. You had forgotten how strong he was. You had forgotten how cruel he could be. You had forgotten _Greg_.

Greg is at least eight years older, and you wonder just how long you’ve been carrying the lantern. He’s taller, but not much, mid-teens, and his eyes are just as bright as you remember, dumb smile much more charming than you used to find it.

He’s outfitted in tramping gear, he’s got a heavy pack and proper boots and a compass, and he looks comfortable with it all, he looks like he’s on a trip he’s been planning, he looks like he’ll be able to last in the woods, and he’s singing one of the nonsense songs he used to when he walked at your side.

You get out a ‘mrph’ against the beast’s hand.

He hears. He stops, and looks around, and calls out, “Wirt?”

The beast’s fingers part around your mouth, and you scream out, “ _Greg_ ,” and there’s at least eight years of hollow pain and loss rolling through you and out your mouth, and you see the terror of your tone shake him as he stares at you, through you, into the dark between the trees.

The beast’s hand is tight over your mouth again, and you cry muffled nothings against his fingers. He starts dragging you backwards, your heels digging into the dirt as you try to fight it but helpless against the strength of his pull. Greg is leaving the path, he’s following the sound of your scream, and you need to warn him, you need to reach him, and you can barely breathe.

You bite down hard into the beast’s hand, but oil bubbles up around the wood between your teeth, slick and disgusting, and you gag uselessly against his palm. The hand moves a moment later, and you cry, “Greg, stop, don’t follow,” before it’s back, beast pulling you away quicker, smothering you against the greasy wounds of his hand.

It’s not fair, you think, and you’re shaking under the weight of everything that’s come back to you, and you did this all to save Greg and now the beast is using you to lure him off the path. You had a deal, and the beast doesn’t care, and the beast is laughing, and you think he must have planted something deep inside you, and you think he must have eaten your memories, and you _hate him_ and he’s shrouded you in his darkness and Greg can’t see you, but Greg’s looking.

The next time he shifts his hand to let you scream, you stay quiet. You worked it out. You do sob bitterly because you can’t help it, you can’t believe the betrayal. Greg is still following, crashing determinedly through the trees, off the path, into the wilds, and then the beast whisks you away.

It takes a long time. It takes a _very_ long time, and the beast makes you watch it all. You get days away, maybe a week, but always he steers you back around to watch your brother, and always he wraps himself around you, arms a cage, keeping you distant and smothered and helpless.

You’d thought the beast was fond of you. You think maybe this is just what it likes to do. What must humans be to one such as him? You’d thought he liked you.  

Greg had been prepared, and he had supplies for months, and he’d studied outdoors survival. He’d been determined. And he’d heard your voice.

It takes a long time.

By the time he’s started taking root, you’re not doing much better yourself. It’s been raining three days, and there are shoots coming up from under your fingernails, and the pain in your ears escalated to throbbing agony when the vines pushed their way out. You watch your brother, and you wish you hadn’t wasted so much time defining him as ‘half’, and the tendril in your throat forced its way up to replace your tongue days ago so words would be beyond you even if you had any. Greg hasn’t smiled in a long time. His food ran out. Wild animals tore up the rest of his supplies. He’s leaning back against a tree, and he’s soaked through to the bone, and you watch as his head falls to his chest, watch as his eyes shut, and you’re so past screaming but you try one more time to reach out to him.

But the beast is there, and the beast is at your ears, and he whispers to you around the leaves, and you hear the inhuman side of him like you haven’t since you were a scared child. And he says, “Didn’t you want this?”

You can’t speak. You can’t tell him you never, never did. There’s a pain behind your eyes, and the vines in your head are all reaching down to wrap around your neck. You hear a chuckle that you will no longer mistake for fondness.

He lets you go and you move on weak, bound limbs, crawling through the mud to reach Greg. The edelwood moved fast, curling up around him, and the sprouts under your nails mean you can’t dig him out, and the vines on your neck are a tight choking collar. You think this is fine. You think this is fair. You remember, you took up the lantern to save him, and if you couldn’t do that, you don’t want the lantern either.

You curl up at the base of your brother’s tree, and let yourself go. You are cold, and weak, and the bark of Greg’s tree is rough against your skin. You think this is your end, and you don’t mind.

But you feel long wooden fingers on your head, digging in hard, piercing your skull, burying themselves deep in your brain.

You wake up without remembering going to sleep.

You can tell it’s been raining, the earth’s damp but your clothes are dry and you’re not sure how. You didn’t sleep under shelter; just propped up against a tree. An edelwood, round and short.

“Good morning,” the beast says, and he sounds amused, but you don’t know why.

You get up slowly, feeling all your aches. You shouldn’t sleep so badly, you tell yourself, though you’re still not sure why you did. Your fingertips hurt, and your eardrums, but you decided long ago not to pay any mind to those old pains. The lantern sits at your side, as it always does, but the flame is getting a little low. Lucky you found an edelwood, then.

The beast’s hand creeps up your back, settles heavy on your shoulders and rubs in a motion you think might be soothing. In his other hand is your axe, and he offers it to you. “Feed the lantern, Wirt,” he tells you, and he’s still laughing at something but he sounds kind, and you think maybe he’s in a mood to be nice to you. You’ll make the most of it.

The tree is too thick to chop easily, but you do your best, driving the axe into it over and again, until you’re through the trunk and can start taking it apart to grind up. You don’t enjoy the task. You never did like the sound they made when you chopped them, the way the wood groaned like the person they’d used to be could feel it.

You wonder why the beast isn’t telling you this tree’s story. You’re glad, though.

“That’s it,” the beast tells you, and he takes your hand when you’re done. You’re cold, and still a little confused, but his presence is a comfort, the way he pulls you along to some destination reassuring. “Let’s go.”

You go. Later, you feel like there’s something wrapped around your throat, but you check over and again and there’s nothing. It’s worrying, but not too much. Just part of being in the woods, you think. Part of holding the lantern. You remember something you haven’t in a long time, and you’re not sure why, but you recall that it was a deal. You smile a little at the thought; it’s strange to think of the time before you served the beast, anything you would have wanted enough to make a deal for. You don’t remember what you traded yourself for, but you’re so happy now; you’re sure it was worth it.


End file.
